The Woman on the Mountain

by Sharyn Munro

  Many of the choices I’ve made seem to have been unconsciously influenced by that early desire not to be ordinary. I always wanted to leave more than a record of a mundane, even if well done, daily routine. At ten, I used to agonise only over whether it would be as an artist, an author or a ballerina. In some ways I’m writing this book to show that it is possible to belatedly clamber back onto the path to fulfilling dreams.

  Was my desire not to be ordinary just the unrealistic ambition of an egotistical malcontent? Or the striving for meaning in life by a creative but undisciplined mind? Naturally I’ll choose the latter. Others apparently know the answer, for they nod sagely, ‘Ah, an Aquarian—that explains it.’

  On my 49th birthday I vowed to take action to regain that creative path, so as to be able to greet 50 with pride and pleasure. By then I knew that life did not usually drop gifts into the laps of we poor sods, no matter how talented. Success, happiness—they all have to be worked for. Even then we might miss out, but the trying brings unforeseen benefits.

  Firstly, I would get serious about writing. I did not want writing to be just another ‘if only’ at the end of my life. I’d been dabbling with short stories for too long. I would start treating them as work, getting them up to scratch and sending them out to competitions. Only when they were acknowledged as top standard would I try to get them published. I had my first major win two years later.

  Secondly, I would stop dyeing my hair, whose Scottish black had begun greying too soon, after the insanity of my marriage break-up. When I did, there were unexpected side effects, like suddenly becoming invisible as a female. No more wolf whistles. I’d have cherished those last two uncouthly shrilled syllables if I’d known; I might even have taken a bow.

  So by 50 I was ready for the perception of my older age by others, which mattered less and less because I was writing often enough to know I was a writer, so I was excited at the years ahead of plunging into that addictive world. The next 50 years, I told myself, re-polishing the thought that Elizabeth Jolley wasn’t published until her fifties.

  Now I learn that she only got about half her ‘next 50 years’. My heart hurts whenever I think of her in a nursing home, suffering from Alzheimer’s. All those lost lovely words.

  It reinforces my resolve to stay on the path, and it reinforces the message I learnt in September 2002, to maximise ‘now’. For if Dad’s lifestyle choice made me a bushie instead of a westie, his death made me a hermit.

  CHAPTER 3

  CLOSE TO THE ELEMENTS

  Hermits often hide out on mountains, but I have a particular excuse. My Munro ancestors came from the edge of the Scottish highlands, so it’s in my blood to find valleys rather claustrophobic.

  My mountain is about 1000 metres in altitude. In recent years I have discovered that the Scots call any mountain over 3000 feet (914.4 metres) a ‘Munro’, as apparently a Munro first listed such peaks in Scotland, and people who climb them are called ‘Munro baggers’.

  Perhaps this also explains why I’m so self-critical—a perpetual bagger of this Munro?

  The mountains I face are over 1500 metres. These ranges being so high, we catch a lot of rain. In the 1970s we were told that around 1500 millimetres was the annual average, but an average can allow for great extremes. Our little family had moved here permanently in January 1979, having spent the previous six months visiting, checking out the best sites, noting sun angles and prevailing winds, testing soil. We’d arrived in our overladen Kombi, towing an overladen trailer. Unbeknownst to us the mountains had received about 100 millimetres of rain in a deluge the night before.

  We slipped and fishtailed on the dirt road, just made it over the last flooded creek crossing, got bogged and were towed out twice, then were finally trounced by the last steep rise before our gate. Abandoning the trailer, we slid the Kombi back down the hill, took a mighty run-up, and managed to get up the hill and inside the gate. There we left it, since our own track was newly bulldozed, and of soft and treacherous clay

  In the drizzle and near dark we stumbled down the track carrying a few essentials. Although we kept telling the kids that this was an adventure, we felt plain miserable. The tent had been erected on a previous trip, so we made a cold dinner and crawled into our beds. At least the tent didn’t leak, but it was not an auspicious start to our new life.

  We had to wait two days for the rain to ease enough for us to ferry our gear down, a laborious operation that took another two days. The wheelbarrow, laden to three times its height, was very handy for this. However, to get it over the uneven track and up the inclines, my husband had to run at them, so care of the contents was not his priority. On one load, when we took off the plastic covering, the entire barrowful appeared to be coated in peanut butter, until we worked out that my big glass jar of flour had broken, as had a large bottle of soy sauce above it.

  Later that year it became drier than we could have imagined, although the spring in the gully near our camp kept up its small flow from somewhere deep underground, unaffected by surface drought. Yet despite the extremes dealt by the elements, that first year here, living mainly outdoors, remains the happiest of my life.

  About seven years ago I found my diary from that year—the only year I have not either stumbled to a halt by March or missed many days. As I’d used a blank page book, I wasn’t restricted in how much I wrote each day, although the entries got shorter and the handwriting more illegible as the year went on.

  Re-reading it, I am astonished at our pioneering energy—digging trenches for the house and for laying water pipes, carting rocks for foundations, making mudbricks, erecting fences, digging around and under and burning out huge old stumps, turning a tussocky paddock into a garden, planting vegetables and herbs, fruit and nut trees—and still I was enjoying cooking and teaching the kids, and getting to know my new world.

  We may have had our feet in the dust but we remained civilised; we ate and drank well, and never missed reading to the kids at night. Here’s a diary sample, from my 31st birthday evening:

  Made dough for bread tomorrow. Had ratatouille ( after Dr Dolittle). Clouds over far mountains amazing while heavy mist in valley below like a river. Now (9.30) in dense cloud here. Played Respighi cassette tonight as birthday treat—and Mildara Chardonnay Champagne (quite a strong taste).

  Playing the tape was a treat because it used up the batteries far more quickly than the radio did—and we needed our daily dose of ABC radio. Later we would get smarter, and clip a lead onto the car battery.

  For dining, under the spreading arms of a white mahogany tree we had set up a card table and canvas director’s chairs, with holes dug in the ground for the uphill chair legs so diners didn’t roll down the slope when eating, as several unwary visitors had done. As they were a little tipsy at the time, they rolled easily and didn’t hurt themselves, although the sight was so funny that the sides of the callous and equally tipsy spectators ached for some time.

  Our chosen clearing had appeared to be a gentle slope but actually was relentlessly unflat, as each small area that needed to be level soon proved. Everywhere involved walking uphill, to or from, and we got very fit, especially carrying buckets of water up the steep incline from the spring. That was excellent for deportment too; only my straightest back would keep the buckets from bumping into the slope ahead and spilling.

  My cooktop was an old fridge rack balanced on four rocks, my cooking equipment was disposal store cast iron—camp oven, frying pan and saucepan—and one heavy aluminium soup pot. (I know, I know, it’s toxic—I don’t use any aluminium now!) From our Merriwa camping weekends I’d developed quite a collection of recipes for one-pot or one-pan dishes. For those weekends I used to cheat a little to compensate for the absence of bench space, like making the dough and rolling the balls for chapatis at home, in which form they’d happily sit until I was ready to flatten them and cook over the fire to accompany the Saturday night curry. Now I had the luxury of the card table as a bench.

  The camp
oven, buried in hot ashes and coals, worked well, but I could only bake one thing at a time in it. We bought a rusty fuel stove for $10 and set it up close to the big tree above the ‘kitchen’.

  The first time I used it I wrote:

  Took a long time for oven to heat up but finally cooked pitta, pumpkin pie and two veg. strudels in it. Flue melted its joins and blew off.

  Here’s another baking morning.

  Lit fuel stove—baked cookies first, then two loaves bread, then prune loaf, then Rieska [quick rye bread for lunch]. Used top to warm yoghurt, de-candy honey, cook chickpeas, etc. All done by 12.30. We got sand and rocks for last trench. Finished that by evening.

  Was that me, that so-organised, energetic young woman? Where did she go?

  In this primitive kitchen I was making soft cheese and yoghurt, since I could buy unpasteurised milk from the dairy about three-quarters of an hour’s drive away, where the tar road started. The top of the $12 kerosene refrigerator, near its rear vent, proved to be an ideal warm spot for yoghurt to ‘clabber’ or bread to rise. Although eating meat didn’t bother my family, cooking it bothered me, and they were happy to eat only vegetarian food at home—it was also much easier to keep fresh safely.

  After 32 years I am still a vegetarian; and that flower-painted kero fridge now sits on my verandah, to be pressed into back-up service when I have visitors, like my son, who like their beer colder than I run my small 24-volt fridge. Unfortunately all the dairies are gone, as in the 1980s a large state dam drowned the main valley through which we used to drive from town.

  We had thought hard about whether we should have a milking cow and keep poultry, to be really self-sufficient. But we decided against ‘farming’ animals, mainly due to my dilemma about the unwanted male calves or chickens that would inevitably be produced. To give them away would have been sending them to the axe en route to oven and dinner table—second-hand guilt, first-hand responsibility. No.

  On the very first night that my husband stayed in Newcastle for work, I had a sense of adventure, being alone in the bush, but wasn’t at all scared. I read the kids to sleep in their double-decker stretcher, then sat out by the fire for a while, listening to the night noises. Feeling tired, I went in and made up the ‘double bed’ on the old carpet with which we’d covered the tent’s plastic floor. This process was simple enough: a double sleeping bag laid over two side-by-side single foam mattresses that were stacked up during the day as a ‘lounge’, to make walking space beside the kids’ bed, as the tent was very small. I fell asleep peacefully

  I was awoken by the most fearsome, fierce, ferocious, frightening noise I had ever heard in real life. It seemed to be inches from my ear, just the other side of the fragile canvas wall. I knew there were no savage man-eating animals in the Australian bush, no bears, no tigers, and yet to my movie-fed brain the sound was as if both of those had bred with a rabid dog to produce this offspring. Such a noise had to be accompanied by bared, sharp teeth. One slash of a claw and my children and I would be exposed to this monster of the night!

  Well and truly scared now, but acting the grown-up, I grabbed the torch and rushed to unzip the tent door to the tiny annexe of mosquito netting, where we had stored tools and the kero fridge. Here I seized a hammer on my way to unzip the outer netting door. (Note: circular zips are not a quick or silent way to get out or in or to surprise an intruder.)

  The noise had stopped long before I emerged into the darkness; the torch beam revealed nothing but the gum tree, looming, and the canvas shower bag, swinging. I zipped my way back to bed and lay in trepidation until nearly dawn. The kids woke me shortly after.

  Later that day I lit the fire and boiled the billies for the kids’ shower. We had four billies made from large ex-Golden Circle pineapple juice tins, with fencing-wire handles. From a fairly horizontal branch of the grey gum beside the tent we’d erected a pulley system for the shower bag, which had a luxuriously adjustable copper rose. Four thin poles supported a hessian modesty panel that still allowed great views to the far mountains, and bush rocks prevented muddy feet.

  I let down the bag to fill it—a bucket of cold water and two billies of hot water gave a surprisingly long and satisfying shower. I tipped it up to empty out any leaves first. Instead, a handful of black pellets fell to the rock floor.

  At that stage I was unfamiliar with the various calling cards of my neighbours, so I couldn’t say who’d left these. Next night, and most nights afterwards, the night monster came to loudly mark its territory, wake us up, walk along the branch of the grey gum, shit in the shower bag, and depart. ‘Take that, you ignorant upstarts, you intruders, you!’

  On his return, my husband, who’d grown up in a leafy suburb, had known the noise immediately and had laughed at my terrified descriptions. It was ‘only’ a possum. Perhaps because we’d had a dog but no trees near the house on the farm where I grew up, I’d never heard one.

  After a short time of our tent living, the night monster possum began including us on his route earlier in the evening, so he too could sample the dinner. Any dish placed on the ground or on the washing-up stand would be lumbered up to with his full-nappy gait, inspected, and usually cleaned up. Rice was very popular. No matter if the dish happened to be beside our feet; we were of no importance. We didn’t mind because he then ceased to wake us in the middle of the night, and no longer felt the need to mark his territory in our shower bag.

  The unpredictable weather often caused us access problems until we got a four-wheel-drive vehicle. Being an ex-teacher (Secondary and Infants) I’d been classed as a registered ‘school’, and on the two days when my husband was away I taught my son. Because we felt it important that he mixed with other children, he went to the nearest school three days a week.

  That meant leaving here at 6.45a.m. to make it to the school bus, which turned round near the dairy, at the end of its run. The bus would then take him to the one-teacher school 27 kilometres away. Getting to the bus on time was difficult in winter, when the day began and ended in the dark. The night before, I would boil the billies and fill a large thermos or two with hot water. This was enough for a civilised start, providing a warm wash and warm Weetbix.

  It was understood that if my son didn’t show up we were probably rained in. My daughter started the next year, and both my kids loved that little school. The teacher was young and friendly and funny; his wife, a teacher in town, was a delight. We became friends with them—I still am. He reckoned that my kids’ enrolment meant they finally had enough pupils to form a cricket team. He also tells the possibly apocryphal yarn of how the school’s rural area was then so quiet that a car passing was such a big event that the kids would stop a cricket game to watch!

  In the May of that year we were truly rained in. My entries complain of the tent starting to leak at the seams, of difficulties lighting the fire, of me holding an umbrella over my husband while he tried. We had a gas lamp and bottle, so why on earth hadn’t we bought a gas ring?

  By the third day of nonstop rain I wrote:

  Awoke to feel the carpet risen on a bed of water under the tent floor. Colder today. Bread low, no biscuits left (plain)—very little cake—so lit fuel stove (with kero) and baked soda bread, wheat biscuits, Anzac slice, bran muffins and cooked a curry. Once going, easier than the fire. Drains all full and flowing. Not game to look in toy tent. Kids fractious for the first time.

  No doubt I did all that cooking under an umbrella too. Two days later I wrote:

  Five days and nights is a bit much!

  That weekend the teacher turned up on his trailbike, bearing brandy like a good St Bernard, to check on us.

  We were starting to have setbacks from more than the weather as the realities of our bush idyll sank in. A few days after the sun finally came out again I wrote:

  Find it hard to believe we only have this many bricks (608). Seem to have been at it for ages. Also the bloody possum last week ate all capsicums! Also hearts of cabbages nearly ready. It took him ages to dis
cover them but he made a mess then.

  We had netted the perimeter of the vegetable garden to 1.8 metres but hadn’t worried about putting netting over the top against climbing critters. We didn’t think we had to, as the possum had left it alone for months—until the vegetables were worth his trouble. But there was worse to come. In August:

  Near dark when got home—about 7—discovered that cows had walked our garden fence down (netting) and eaten every scrap of veg. and seedling and trampled all new seed beds, new rhubarb crowns etc. Completely bare so suddenly! Fence on N-E boundary very important now—like a lot of other things round here. Very depressing.

  The cattle belonged to the original owner, who’d never needed fences since he’d owned the whole area, and he didn’t see why he should start fencing the cattle in just because he’d sold some of his land. They wandered far and wide and many had been doing so for years; our intruders were, in effect, wild. Whenever I saw them anywhere near our clearing I would race towards them yelling like a banshee, waving and throwing sticks at them. How I didn’t break a leg in my frenzied runs across the rough ground I don’t know, but our territory had to be claimed—and reclaimed.

  We were told that to keep cattle out, a fence needed to be of barbed wire. As we were due to go away on holidays, that partial boundary fence had to be finished first. In cold rain, with scratched and sore fingers, leeches in our boots and water down our necks, we worked to get it done. It was extremely unpleasant—as far from idyllic as possible. On the last day, I left my poor husband to run out the final roll of wire while I went to pack.